Your Voice is Power is a Canadian education program and creative music competition that challenges teens to use coding basics to separate, edit, and remix tracks. In 2024, the celebration came with an added focus: Indigenous music.
“I think it's really a unique experience,” Marika Schalla, an Indigenous educator behind the program, told CTV News Calgary.
In addition to teaching computer science skills, the program also welcomes nuanced conversations on the socioeconomic and environmental hardships faced by First Nations, Inuit, and Métis people.
For Indigenous students, it’s an invitation to swirl their lived experiences into their art. For their classmates, it's an opportunity to listen as they learn beside them.
“You wouldn't think that coding music and social justice would go so beautifully together, but they create a meaningful message,” Schalla said. “They're going to be going out into the community prepared and know that it is possible to have a job in computer science or STEM, even if you're an Indigenous kid from the reserve.”
Using EarSketch — a free online coding editor available in English, French, Ojibwe, and Inuktitut — teens will remix the works of Indigenous artists, including Dakota Bear, Jayli Wolf, Samian, Twin Flames, and Aysanabee.
The program ends in a music competition, and the two winners — one Indigenous, one a non-Indigenous ally — will receive $5,000 scholarships.
“Music is a universal language,” Dakota Bear said. “It's a vibrational frequency. It's that feeling it evokes, that emotion. So music, being that universal language, also connects us on a different level as human beings. When you have music and use that with the message, it just becomes so much more impactful.”
A version of this article originally appeared in the 2024 Music Edition of the Goodnewspaper.
Header image via Hitesh Choudhary
